Multi-Party Quantum Key Distribution Protocol with New Bell States Encoding Mode

Abstract

Security, efficiency and universality are the major concerns in distributed computation for how to communicate securely as there are a large number of nodes that require interactive authentication. These become more challenging especially for the multi-party quantum environment as it is highly complicated and heterogeneous in nature. Hence, based on bell states and unitary operation, we propose a multi-party quantum group key distribution protocol. The initial two participants are generated by election algorithm to ensure the fairness among the participants in our protocol. Next, mutual authentication is provided by two Bell states of four orthogonal maximal states, and the group session key is obtained by combining unitary operation. The main innovations of this scheme are that the authenticated information with the group key is transmitted among the ordered participants, and the efficiency of our protocol is acceptable which the time complexity of QKD is $$ O\left(\left\lceil {\mathit{\log}}_2^N\right\rceil \right) $$ with the N-party. Through security analysis and efficiency analysis, the protocol can effectively resist internal attacks and external attacks, and has feasible efficiency.